Not so many years ago, perhaps five, there was a country known as “Iraq .” That Iraq no longer exists. It has been replaced by two Iraqs . No, I am not referring here to the Kurdish Autonomous Region, nor to the nascent Shia statelet likely about to be created in the south, though either of these could be considered as break-up products of that former country.
I am, rather, referring to the two zones into which Iraq has become divided, the Green Zone and the Red Zone. The Green Zone, a.k.a. the “International Zone,” the “Ultimate Gated Community,” or more appropriately, the “United States of Iraq,” is the place where the various would-be rulers of Iraq have congregated since the March-April 2003 invasion. The colonial administration, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), set up its headquarters here. After the June 2004 handover of “sovereignty” but little power to an Iraqi Interim Government with its Prime Minister forced upon United Nations officials nominally in charge by theUnited States , this government made its home in the Green Zone. The current "elected," but largely powerless, Shia-dominated government also "rules" from this zone.
For the Americans there, life in the Green Zone resembles life in the United States , with just enough of an exotic tinge to make it interesting. Nightclubs serve liquor , women jog in shorts and sports bras, and pool parties sometimes get wild. McDonalds and Burger King are available, though, just as in many modern American cities, kebabs served by real natives are available for the daring.
For the
time of the CPA, the Green Zone was a nice career stop-over point for those
hoping to get
some attention in the modern Republican Party. A few months there helped
get that coveted PR job back in the States. Of course there was the occasional
mortar shell to contend with, but the hint of danger helped relieve the boredom
that was, perhaps, the greater risk of service in the colonies.
So what
of the Red Zone? It is the place where those Iraqis not cleared to get near the
occupation forces live. The place where people go about their lives in a
situation economically much worse off than that before the invasion. In the Red
Zone people die by the tens or hundreds
of thousands, from bombs and bullets, yes, both Iraqi and American, but
also from crime, from disease, and from lack of basic
medical care. In the Red Zone clean
water is scarce, electricity available but a few hours a day, if that, and doctors are
increasingly rare as the few remaining flee to the safety of exile. And
boredom, that plague of the Green Zone, also plagues the Red Zone as millions
of women and children, and increasingly men as well, are afraid to step outside
the house for months on end as fear of murder and abduction keeps them under
long-term house arrest.
The Green
Zone sometimes sees conflict between US political officials with their
fantastic visions of an occupied
Iraq willing and able to submit to
every whim of the occupiers, and the Iraqi officials with their visions of an ascendant
Shia state. The Red Zone, in contrast, sees daily conflict between numerous
militias with varied political and governmental loyalties, some labeled police,
army, special Interior Ministry death and torture squads, others known as the
militias of various political parties and organizations, while yet others are
labeled as “insurgents,” “terrorists,” “jihadists,” or “freedom fighters”
depending on who is doing the labeling.
As
Iraq is divided
into these two separate but unequal worlds, there are those who go between
them, who cross the barriers separating the two worlds. Among these are the
US
soldiers, the “grunts,” upon whom the day-to-day tasks of occupation fall. Unlike the politicians, bureaucrats and
corporate scam artists of occupation, who can often do their jobs without
stepping foot in the Red Zone, these soldiers cross the border between the two
Iraqs on a regular basis. Can these ambassadors of freedom, and of occupation,
bridge the two
Iraqs?
How do they construe the situation thrust upon them? Perhaps the experiences of
these soldiers can shed light upon the evolving relations of the two
Iraqs,
relations so complex as to challenge the pundits who attempt to make sense of
the Iraqi mess for the folks back home.
Insights
into the experiences of the
US
soldiers in
Iraq
can be found occasionally in the accounts
of reporters and in the torrent of memoirs pouring out from those veterans desperate
to tell their story as they seek, somehow, to fit back into a land they
believed they were defending, but into which they no longer seem to fit.
I
examined three early specimens of these memoirs – Colby Buzzell’s My
War: Killing Time in Iraq; John Crawford’s The
Last True Story I'll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier's Account of the War in
Iraq; and Kayla Williams’ Love
My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army – for
insights into the experiences and inner lives of GIs in Iraq. These works, and
their authors, each have distinctive perspectives to express. Two of them –
Buzzell and Williams – enlisted in the
army, whereas Crawford was one of those shocked National Guard troops
victimized by the unprecedented massive use of the Guard to recruit for a war
many at home did not consider worth fighting. Two of these authors – Crawford
and Williams – were present during the initial invasion and
had the experience of being welcomed as liberators by at least some of the
population, whereas Buzzell arrived in
Iraq in October, 2003, when the war
after the victory was getting underway. And, of course, two of the authors are
male, whereas Williams conveys some of the unique perspective of today’s female
soldiers.
To begin
with, how do these authors portray their motivation to fight in
Iraq? Three
reasons are mentioned: loyalty to comrades; keeping one’s contract (one’s
word); and the excitement of combat. For all three, loyalty to comrades is a
prime factor, though this loyalty is
tinged with the need to prove that one is as tough as the rest, even to the
extent, as in the case of Williams, of putting off needed medical care and
suffering pain for months in fear of being deployed late and not serving with
her buddies. It is also Williams who says: “It might not mean too much to give
your word anymore, but that did not mean we would not keep ours” (p. 61).
But there
is a thrill to combat that attracts on its own. Crawford discusses an outcast
among his unit, a man about which “we all had our doubts over whether or not he
was a ‘trigger-puller’ – whether or not he could take a serious shot at someone
– whereas the rest of us had come to live
for the moment“ (p. 65; emphasis added). This thrill, when combined with
the bonds that hold the group together can be an overpowering force. Thus,
Buzzell, after describing his return home to a world in which he may never
again fit, a world in which he contemplated becoming a homeless veteran, gives
a sense of the libidinous excitement that bonds as he concludes his story with:
“But then again, if I ever got a call from the battalion
commander saying he was getting everyone from Second Platoon Company 1/23 INF
back together to go ‘Punish the Deserving' for one last tomahawk chop out there
in Iraq, and that he was going to lead the way, and everyone was going, and
they needed me as an M240 Bravo machine gunner again, I’d probably tell him, 'That’s
a good copy sir. Let’s roll.’
"Hell yeah.”
Noticeably
absent from these motivations was any interest in helping the Iraqi people, or
even in removing those dreaded WMD. In fact, one of the characteristics of
these books is that Iraqis are at best bit players in the story, referred to as
they are by the varied terms: hajji, raghead, towelheads, camel jockeys, or
“the fucking locals” (Williams, p. 200). None of these authors devoted much
energy to trying to comprehend why thousands of Iraqis were risking their lives
to fight the
US
troops in their country. None of these three books even mentions the divisions
that divide Iraqi society and have become the basis for the developing civil
war. In reading them I did not notice even the words Sunni or Shia. Kurds are
hardly mentioned, and Arab-Kurd tension does not appear.
Williams,
as an army linguist who received a year of Arabic training, had a distinct
advantage over the other two authors; she could actually talk to Iraqis. Even
so, her greatest opportunity to talk with Iraqis occurred when she spent time
in the mountains near the Syrian border, meeting Yezidis, a mysterious
Kurdish-speaking religious sect who, despite strong Islamic influences, insisted
on telling Williams over and over: “We are like Jews. And we are like
Christians. But we are not like
Muslims…. We love Americans because you hate Muslims” (pp. 184-185). These
conversations forced Williams to assert, unsuccessfully, that Americans do not
hate Muslims.
Perhaps
because he arrived in Iraq several months into the occupation, after bases were
built to house the soldiers and after the insurgency had started and it was
becoming more dangerous for Americans to interact informally with Iraqis,
Buzzell reports essentially no interactions with Iraqis other than those on
base selling trinkets at the Hajji shops (p. 150), or when reading “Fuck You
Americans” graffiti on a highway overpass (p. 170). For him “every single
neighborhood in
Iraq
looks the same” (p. 336). The one Iraqi he was able to converse with was one of
his unit’s Iraqi interpreters, “the first English-speaking Iraqi person I could
find” (p. 330) who strongly supported
the
US
invasion, saw considerable progress during the occupation, and opposed the
resistance. This interpreter disappeared, either having resigned under threat
of being killed or actually having been killed.
Crawford
conveys the overall sense of alienation from Iraqis when he describes meeting a
dog who licked his face: “At least someone in
Iraq was glad to see me” (p. 43).
When an Iraqi came to inform the Americans about an insurgent house, he
describes the troops' reaction: “I
didn’t care about the informant… -- none of us did. I figured that killing him would
only serve to decrease the hajji population by one, so fuck him” (p. 68).
At
another point Crawford relays a conversation with one of his comrades about the
Iraqis who drink on the banks of the
Tigris:
"'You know
there used to be bull sharks this far north in the
Tigris?'
Sellars told me once. He had just read a book about man-eaters. 'It got too
polluted for them to live here. Too bad there aren’t any now. Wouldn’t that be
some shit? Fucking Hajji getting eaten up.'
"'Yeah, I’d pay a dollar to see that'" (pp.
116-117).
Not
surprisingly Crawford and his buddies raided these Iraqis to steal their beer,
appearing to resent, especially, that these Iraqis could party and feel at home
while the soldiers were aliens in this land.
Yet, for
Crawford, and for Williams, there was a longing, a hunger, for contact with
Iraqis, as there was for certain Iraqis to reach out to him. After
inadvertently saving a homeless kid from bullies, Crawford developed a mascot nicknamed
"Cum", who wanted nothing more than to protect his American
protectors (pp. 101-106). Through Cum,
Crawford met Leena, an English-speaking former university student forced to
give up her studies because of the danger in postwar
Iraq. Leena’s grandmother
apparently tried to arrange a marriage. While Crawford, married already, wasn’t
receptive to the proposal, there was a powerful pull as he found Leena’s
company enjoyable, helping to distract him from life in an alien environment:
“It was like being home, even if only for brief moments. Her smile was
infectious, and her laughter sounded to me like flowers growing” (p. 111).
While the
language of sexual attraction may be universal, the cultural context is ignored
only at one’s peril. Leena’s cousin, who didn't approve of her flirting with
Crawford, intervened. Later, Crawford found out that Leena’s house had been
burned down; he never saw Leena or Cum again. He turned his back on the house
and went back to work. The problematic nature of this relationship for Crawford
was indicated through the terms he used to express to his Sergeant his concerns
about what happened to Leena and Cum, perhaps defensively, “I know they’re just
hajjis, but still, you know, its kinda my fault for talking to them” (p. 113).
While
these occasional attempts to make contact
were thwarted, the soldiers mostly were absorbed with their job and deeply
conflicted about the institution of which they were part. Despite having lots
of unoccupied time, they had little time to actually reflect on the world into
which they had entered. Part of the genius of the military, as it comes through
in these memoirs, is its sadomasochistic structure that keeps the soldiers perpetually
distracted and unable to critically reflect. Like any authoritarian
bureaucracy, there are the absurd rules, the petty dictators, and the everyday
rebellions. These rules and the accompanying rebellions deflect attention from
the larger structures and contexts in which the soldiers are acting. The perpetual struggles around the ridiculous
and the absurd distract from the overarching horror of war and occupation.
As
Williams describes getting ready to deploy to
Iraq, a deployment which she could
have avoided by accepting an offered foot operation, she writes “FTA. We said
it all the time. Some soldiers even took a Sharpie and wrote it on their
duffels or their helmets or boots – any damn place they could find. Fuck the Army” (p. 63; emphasis in
original). "Fuck the Army" but loyally serve it regardless.
Buzzell’s
book is based on a blog he maintained
while in
Iraq,
a blog which signally irritated the army brass, while sometimes receiving
surreptitious praise. He signed his pieces CBFTW, leaving the clear impression
that the “FTW” stood for “Fuck the War.” Buzzell’s blog entries expressed the
excitement of combat, but also tweaked the army and the brass. His entries
became more provocative as he received opposition from military authorities.
But, in the end, it’s the blog of someone who accepted the role of the
complaining grunt and found he had no role when he returned stateside.
The
sado-masochistic relationship of soldier to military permeates these soldiers’
relationships to the Iraqis they came in contact with, those who they
occasionally liked to think they were helping and who were sometimes worth
flirting with, but who were, after all, only hajjis. As Crawford relates, after
U.S.
troops shot two carjackers, killing one and unintentionally castrating the
second, two medics found out that the castrated man had just gotten married
that very night. “They went back to bed for the few remaining hours of
darkness, slightly content in the knowledge that for at least one night,
someone else was more unhappy than they were” (p. 121).
As the
Green Zone became a microcosm of modern American life, with its Burger Kings
and its nightclubs, the American soldiers were those representatives of the
occupation forces who were not allowed to remain in relative safety, oblivious
to the dangers of the Red Zone outside. The various military bases sometimes
came to resemble mini-Green Zones, but the soldiers who lived in them had to
cross the barrier into the Red Zone. If the authors of these memoirs are at all
representative, real engagement with the lives of the Iraqis they met was essentially
impossible. They remained as alien to the country as the political appointees
flitting through the Green Zone on their way to Republican Party advancement. Regardless of the justification for the
invasion and occupation of
Iraq,
the occupation was doomed by its inability to make real contact, and hence to
develop any understanding of the lives of most Iraqis. Absent any understanding
of their way of life, the only way to make contact, real or imagined, was
through death.
Seen in
the light of the experiences described in these memoirs, the horrors of Haditha and
the other
massacres coming to light were likely, perhaps even inevitable,
consequences of the occupation of a once-proud land by aliens for whom Iraq
could only represent otherness, "not home," and for whom the people
of this alien land would forever remain "hajjis."
Writings 
Not so many years ago, perhaps five, there was a country known as “Iraq .” That Iraq no longer exists. It has been replaced by two Iraqs . No, I am not referring here to the Kurdish Autonomous Region, nor to the nascent Shia statelet likely about to be created in the south, though either of these could be considered as break-up products of that former country.
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